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"Sometimes called "A Fourth Orientation", asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a persistent lack of sexual attraction toward any gender. This book explores love, sex, and life, from the asexual point of view. This book is for anyone, regardless of orientation. Whether you're asexual, think you might be, know someone who is, or just want to learn more about what asexuality is (and isn't), there's something inside for you"--Page 4 of cover

Freud's readings of Shakespeare are notorious for their universalizing claims about human sexuality. What is less commonly noticed, and what this article foregrounds, is the asexuality that underwrites psychoanalytic theories of sex. Venus and Adonis shows that Shakespeare's poem is replete with asexual encounters. In other words, it is not Adonis alone who spurns sexual romance. Venus's insatiable kissing is a textbook example of Freud's point about the paradoxicality of sex: when it comes to the pleasures of kissing, Freud says, "It's a pity I can't kiss myself." This essay reads asexuality not as a particular orientation; rather, it asks how asexuality, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare disorient our readings of sex.

Lambda Literary Award 2014 Finalist in LGBT Nonfiction Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award 2014 Finalist in Family & Relationships Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015 (IPPY) Silver Medal in Sexuality/Relationships Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2015 Winner in LGBT -- What if you weren't sexually attracted to anyone? A growing number of people are identifying as asexual. They aren't sexually attracted to anyone, and they consider it a sexual orientation--like gay, straight, or bisexual. Asexuality is the invisible orientation. Most people believe that "everyone" wants sex, that "everyone" understands what it means to be attracted to other people, and that "everyone" wants to date and mate. But that's where asexual people are left out--they don't find other people sexually attractive, and if and when they say so, they are very rarely treated as though that's okay. When an asexual person comes out, alarming reactions regularly follow; loved ones fear that an asexual person is sick, or psychologically warped, or suffering from abuse. Critics confront asexual people with accusations of following a fad, hiding homosexuality, or making excuses for romantic failures. And all of this contributes to a discouraging master narrative: there is no such thing as "asexual." Being an asexual person is a lie or an illness, and it needs to be fixed. In The Invisible Orientation, Julie Sondra Decker outlines what asexuality is, counters misconceptions, provides resources, and puts asexual people's experiences in context as they move through a very sexualized world. It includes information for asexual people to help understand their orientation and what it means for their relationships, as well as tips and facts for those who want to understand their asexual friends and loved ones.

Some literature on asexuality has claimed that it is inherently radical and contains the potential for resistance. Unfortunately, this literature has tended to be unempirical, has imagined asexuality as a disembodied entity, and has marginalised the multiple identities held by asexual people. This article, inspired by Plummer's critical humanist approach, seeks to explore how individuals understand their asexuality to encourage forms of political action in the areas of identity, activism, online spaces, and LGBT politics. What we found was a plurality of experiences and attitudes with most adopting a pragmatic position in response to their social situation which saw large-scale political action as irrelevant. We conclude by reflecting on what these results mean for those who see asexuality as potentially radical.

Asexuality is often defined as some degree of being void of sexual attraction, interest, or desire. Black asexual people have been made invisible, silent, or pathologized in most fiction, scholarly literature, and mainstream LGBTQ movements. Claire Kann&rsquo ; s 2018 young adult romance novel, Let&rsquo ; s Talk About Love, explores Black asexuality at the intersection of race and (a)sexuality. Through the story of the Black, bi-romantic, asexual, 19 year-old college student Alice Johnston, this text illuminates the diversity of Black sexuality in the Black Diaspora. Using a Black feminist sociological literary analysis to complete a close reading of the novel, I interrogate what Let&rsquo ; s Talk about Love offers for defining a Black asexual politic. To consider Black asexual politics beyond the controlling images of the asexual Mammy figure, and not merely in juxtaposition to the hypersexual Jezebel, calls us to instead center agency and self-definition. This project seeks to answer what Conscious Black Asexuality is, why it is a necessary concept for asexuality studies and the Diaspora, where we locate Black asexuality in Black history, and how Let&rsquo ; s Talk about Love by Claire Kann presents a depiction of Black agentic queerness that reclaims agency and intimacy within one&rsquo ; s sexual politics.

Asexuality, quickly becoming a burgeoning sexual identity category and subject of academic inquiry, relies at this budding moment of identity demarcation on a series of scientific studies that seek to 'discover' the truth of asexuality in and on the body. This article considers the existing scientific research on asexuality, including both older and more obscure mentions of asexuality as well as contemporary studies, through two twin claims: (1) that asexuality, as a sexual identity, is entirely specific to our current cultural moment – that it is in this sense culturally contingent, and (2) that scientific research on asexuality, while providing asexuality with a sense of credibility, is also shaping the possibilities and impossibilities of what counts as asexuality and how it operates. In the first section, I consider how older scientific research on asexuality, spanning from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, is characterized by a disinterest in asexuality. Next, turning to recent work on asexuality, the beginning of which is marked by Anthony Bogaert's 2004 study, I demonstrate how asexuality becomes 'discovered', mapped, and pursued by science, making it culturally intelligible even while often naturalizing, in the process, what I argue are harmful sexual differences.